Transition One · From the Names to the Bodies

Part One is finished. Two things are in hand.

A signature: the ten epithets. The highest of arrivals is certified not by a checklist of "what He can do" but by ten names—and those ten are not ten virtues earned beyond severance, but the one full freedom read out from ten angles into ten names. Naming-full is being-full: the names are complete because the being is full. This signature only the being that has walked the cause-stage exhausted can sign.

A break: two sets of ten masteries. At the eighth ground the bodhisattva, too, "attains ten masteries"—the same ten, each called a mastery; yet that is the cause-stage's freedom, the freedom "able to manifest the Buddha's virtues yet not itself possessing them"—the freedom of which the Buddhas say, to his face, "you have not yet attained." The Buddha's ten masteries are the fruit-stage's freedom, parted from the cause-stage by the one step of "walking exhausted." Not the dim and bright of one freedom—two sets.

With these two set up, the foundation of the whole volume is laid. But the foundation has only said what this freedom is (ultimate) and what it is not (not the bodhisattva's freedom turned brighter). Downstream, a next question rises at once:

This ultimate freedom—how does it appear?

The question presses because of a thought all too easy to slip into: to take "ultimate freedom" for a hidden, markless, structureless absolute—full and unobstructed, and so dissolved, as it were, into a light without distinction, with nothing left to say, nothing left to see. Were it so, this volume should lay down its pen at Part One: the freedom being full, the rest is excess words.

But scripture does not so treat the buddha-fruit. The buddha-fruit's freedom is not hidden and markless—it has a structure that shows itself, that can be told plainly, that can be seen. Part One read this freedom's readable aspect (the names, the ten epithets); Part Two reads its visible aspect (the bodies).

So this freedom, full to where even its names are complete—once it shows itself forth as body, in what manner of body? One, or several? And if "three bodies"—dharma-body, enjoyment-body, transformation-body—are those three separate Buddhas?

Part Two looks to the three bodies.